1998 Product of the Year Award Winner

Digital phosphor oscilloscopes
deliver analog, digital features

Offering the designer new insight into the behavior of complex signals,
such as those seen in many of today's telecommunications and computer applications,
digital phosphor oscilloscopes (DPOs) are a new class of scope that bridges
the worlds of analog real-time scopes (ARTs) and digital storage oscilloscopes
(DSOs). Like ARTs, the TDS500D and '700D series of DPOs display three dimensions
of complex signal information–amplitude, time, and the distribution of
amplitude over time–in real time. Similar to DSOs, they also analyze and
store the signal information.

The TDS500D and '700D digital phosphor oscilloscopes are offered
as the first scopes able to display, analyze, and store three dimensions
of complex waveform information.

This dual capability is achieved by using an independent, parallel-architecture-based
waveform-imaging processor–called the DPX–that acquires and manages the
three dimensions of waveform information. The DPX compresses images drawn
in the digital phosphor into a 500 x 200 array of integers.

Each integer represents a pixel in the display and is used to control
intensity. The DPX also controls the rate of image decay and sends snapshots
to the display every 1/30 s. Slew-rate weighting is used by the DPX to
allow the DPO display to emulate that of an ART display.

The TDS500D series offers bandwidths of 500 MHz and 1 GHz and has
monochrome displays. The TDS700D series has color displays and offers bandwidths
of 500 MHz, 1 GHz, and 2 GHz.

Depending on the model, both series offer 4 or 2 + 2 channels, single-channel
sample rates of 2 or 4 Gsamples/s, and record lengths from 2 to 8 Mbytes. Each
model provides a sampling rate on all channels of 1 Gsample/s and is capable of
acquiring up to 200,000 records/s and up to 500,000 samples in one acquisition.
(TDS500D, from $9,760; TDS-700D, from $12,695–4 weeks ARO.)

Tektronix
Beaverton, OR
Information 800-426-2200 (press 3, code 1080)
http://www.tek.com/measurement